History Has Always Belonged to the Powerful but Technology Just Changed That

 For most of human history only certain people got to decide what was worth remembering.

Kings decided. Governments decided. Churches decided. Wealthy families decided. The institutions with power and money controlled what got written down, what got preserved and what got passed on to future generations.

Everything else got left out.

The daily lives of working people. The experiences of the poor. The stories of enslaved people. The history of communities that had no power and no voice in the official record. All of it mostly gone because the people who controlled history did not think it mattered.

We are still living with the consequences of those decisions. And for a long time there was not much ordinary people could do about it.

That changed.

What Changed and Why It Matters

The internet changed everything about who can participate in the historical record.

Before the internet if you wanted your story preserved you needed access to institutions. You needed a publisher to print your book. You needed a library to keep it. You needed a newspaper to print your words. You needed an archive to store your documents. All of those institutions had gatekeepers who decided what was worth preserving and what was not.

Today you can publish your own writing and have it indexed by every search engine in the world within hours. You can upload photographs and documents to the Internet Archive at archive.org and have them preserved permanently for free. You can record your voice and put it somewhere millions of people can find it. You can write about your neighborhood, your family, your work, your daily life and make it part of the public record without asking anyone for permission.

The gatekeepers are gone. The tools belong to everyone now.

What That Means for You

This is not a small thing. This is one of the biggest shifts in how history gets made that has ever happened.

For the first time in human history ordinary people have the same basic tools for preserving and sharing their stories that governments and institutions have. The playing field is not perfectly level but it is closer than it has ever been.

That means the historical record of this era can be more complete than any era that came before it. It can include the voices of working people, poor people, single parents, veterans, immigrants, people with disabilities, people in small towns, people in communities that have always been ignored. It can include your voice.

But only if ordinary people actually use the tools available to them.

What You Can Do With This

Write about your life and publish it somewhere public. A blog, a social media account, a document you upload to the Internet Archive. Put it somewhere it can be found.

Record yourself talking about your experience. What you have been through, what the world looks like from where you stand, what you hope for, what you are worried about. Upload that recording somewhere permanent.

Document your neighborhood. Take photos of ordinary places. Interview people who have been in your community for a long time. Preserve what exists before it changes or disappears.

Contribute to public records. Wikipedia accepts contributions from anyone. Local historical societies want material from everyday people. Libraries are actively looking for personal documents and photographs that reflect what ordinary life looked like.

Every one of these actions puts your story into the record. Every one of them makes the historical account of this era a little more accurate and a little more complete.

The powerful have always had people to tell their story. Now you can tell yours.

Robert Lee Beers III is a writer and digital preservation advocate based in North Charleston South Carolina.